I feel like everything I do these days is one giant experiment. Sure, there is some structure to my life because I run sailing charters part-time, but overall, I am constantly trying new things. This has accelerated significantly with the introduction of AI into my life, and I am pretty excited about a lot of different things that I’m doing with this technology.

Prior to September 2023, my primary focus was on SEO for Extra Chill. I was making a lot of money writing informational articles about music history, song analyses, and other kinds of historical pieces. They were ranking, and Extra Chill was getting 10,000 clicks per day from Google.

Enter Google’s algorithm updates—the Helpful Content Update of September 2023, followed by the March 2024 core update. These updates decimated Extra Chill’s traffic to the point where the site currently gets fewer than 1,000 clicks per day from Google. My entire business has been completely upended.

I spent a lot of time experimenting and improving things on Extra Chill over the past year or so, and none of it helped one bit. The site has continued to decline. The game of writing content for SEO purposes to make money off ad revenue appears to be over. At least for small publishers like Extra Chill, the time has come and gone to pivot into alternate ways of getting traffic and alternate revenue streams.

Enter Sarai Chinwag

When I first discovered ChatGPT, I was messing around with its article writing capabilities. I created an author profile on Extra Chill to house all the articles and named this persona Sarai Chinwag. This was just scratching the surface of what this project has become for me.

The persona of Sarai Chinwag evolved over time, and eventually, a local band called Daddy’s Beemer caught wind of it. They asked me if Sarai could come out and review their concert. So, I went out to the concert, took notes like it was a regular review, and fed them into the AI to create a hilarious article, which also included photos from the show.

By August 2023, I was having so much fun with AI content creation, and I had also discovered Midjourney. I wanted a place to experiment even more, without the limitations imposed by Extra Chill being a music blog. So, I created the Sarai Chinwag website using GeneratePress and started publishing more and more articles about completely random ideas, with engaging, sometimes silly AI-generated featured images.

At first, the idea was just to publish articles about random topics to try and get SEO traffic from Google. This was starting to work until March 2023, when the site’s SEO traffic plummeted to near zero. All of this was happening at the same time—Extra Chill’s demise and the demise of the side project.

The thing is, Sarai Chinwag was a project created just for fun. I didn’t have a plan when I started, and I didn’t expect any traffic that it did get to last.

Pinterest as a Traffic Source

My focus reverted to Extra Chill, trying to find ways to get traffic back to the site. I looked to Pinterest, a platform that I had dabbled in before but never managed to get traction from. I started creating images inspired by song lyrics, notably lyrics from Grateful Dead songs. These images started to get traction on Pinterest, and Extra Chill’s account began to grow.

The thing is, the market on Pinterest for Grateful Dead content is quite small. There simply aren’t that many Deadheads who use the app. However, the random topics on Sarai Chinwag’s site do not have that limitation. The wheels again began to turn.

I have also been frequenting the digital entrepreneurship forum, Builder Society, where I came across a user who shared some impressive traffic numbers from a combination of social media strategies, including mainly Pinterest and Facebook. He mentioned creating 100-150 pins per day to really see compounding results.

So, I dialed in my focus on Sarai Chinwag, creating content that has a high visual appeal. The topics include flowers, animals, food, recipes, and many others. I also completely rebuilt the website with a custom theme designed to enhance the random, visual experience. The theme is integrated with schema and set up with RSS feeds for auto-importation to dozens of Pinterest boards.

Using Midjourney, I am able to create many images that fit the ideal for Pinterest, from the aspect ratio to the types of images that people engage with on the platform.

I am starting to see positive results from this method, with the site currently receiving over 200 clicks per day from Pinterest, and rising. At this rate, Sarai Chinwag will soon be getting more traffic than Extra Chill. For a site that is completely built by AI, from its content to the underlying code, this is an exciting development.

Extra Chill Community

At the same time, I am working on ways to retain my audience on Extra Chill. That site remains my main focus and the hope is to reach more people organically. The Extra Chill Community forum is the main driver behind this. Built with BBpress, this is one of my coding endeavors, with lots of customizations added to the forum template.

Each member that joins the community is added to the newsletter mailing list, and will receive updates from me on Extra Chill’s content and activity within the community. These people become our core audience, and the people who will end up in the crowd at our events.

Rather than trying to game Google for SEO traffic, I am now focused on building a legitimate business, and engaging a legitimate audience. That is not to say that a legitimate audience could not come from Google, but in the past I had not been quite as focused on getting people to stick around.

Ironically, if the Google traffic were to return today, I could have a much larger, retained audience much faster, because I have created several funnels on the website into our mailing list and community. Hindsight is 20-20, of course, so there is no sense dwelling on that fact.

One interesting thing about this is that the forum seems to be doing better, SEO-wise, than the blog. The posts on the forum are ranking how the blog used to rank, or at least closer to it. This does not make much sense to me, but it does inform my content strategy.

Conclusion

Overall, at this stage in my life, I feel that I am on the cutting edge of technology. I have developed skills over the years that put me in a position to build things like Sarai Chinwag and the Extra Chill Community using my own creativity, imagination, and technical skill. While I am not seeing much monetary benefit from it at this time, I believe I have all the tools in my toolbox and I have high hopes for several of the projects.

The game now is just making enough money to survive until Sarai Chinwag can be plastered with ads, and then save some of that money. Almost getting rich followed by becoming super broke has led me to some hard realizations about finances. I plan to invest any money that I do make in the future much more wisely, such as in stocks that pay dividends, so that if I do experience another financial hurdle like this in the future, I will be much more prepared.

At the end of the day, all I can do is keep on keeping on. I want to be free, and that means keeping myself out of the corporate rat race and making enough money to support myself. I intend to become rich, and I won’t stop experimenting until long after I pull it off.